AUTHOR ARCHIVES

Kellie Lunney

Kellie Lunney covers federal pay and benefits issues, the budget process and financial management. After starting her career in journalism at Government Executive in 2000, she returned in 2008 after four years at sister publication National Journal writing profiles of influential Washingtonians. In 2006, she received a fellowship at the Ohio State University through the Kiplinger Public Affairs in Journalism program, where she worked on a project that looked at rebuilding affordable housing in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. She has appeared on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, NPR and Feature Story News, where she participated in a weekly radio roundtable on the 2008 presidential campaign. In the late 1990s, she worked at the Housing and Urban Development Department as a career employee. She is a graduate of Colgate University.

November 17, 2016
The incoming Trump administration should consider placing top senior executives in jobs typically held by political appointees, and think about slashing the number of overall appointed positions, the association representing senior executives recommended on Thursday. The Senior Executives Association, which just published a new handbook designed to help political appointees...

November 17, 2016
Lawmakers will work during the lame-duck session to pass another short-term spending measure to keep the government open through March 31, 2017. House and Senate leadership have decided not to move ahead with any fiscal 2017 appropriations bills this year, instead opting to push through another continuing resolution at the...

November 16, 2016
What do the deputy secretary of the Energy Department, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service all have in common? They are among the 40 toughest management jobs in the federal government, according to a bipartisan nonprofit group of former government...

November 15, 2016
This story has been updated with a comment from Wellpoint. The government’s watchdog has rejected nine bid protests filed this past summer by three companies over a lucrative Defense Department contract to deliver health care to service members, military retirees and their families. The Government Accountability Office on Nov. 9...

November 14, 2016
Many federal retirees with Medicare Part B coverage will have to pay 10 percent more in premiums beginning next year, according to the latest data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. CMS just announced the new premium and deductible rates for Medicare Part B, which covers physician services...

November 11, 2016
The percentage of veterans making up the federal workforce remained the same between fiscal years 2014 and 2015, at roughly one-third, according to new data from the Office of Personnel Management. Vets represented 30.9 percent of the total federal workforce in fiscal 2015; 30.8 percent in fiscal 2014; and 30.1...

November 10, 2016
Two former Office of Personnel Management directors are helping lead the Trump team’s transition efforts at OPM and the Office of Management and Budget. Kay Coles James and Linda Springer, who both served during the George W. Bush administration, are helping shepherd transition efforts for Republican President-Elect Trump at OPM...

November 9, 2016
It’s too soon to tell what effect the 2016 presidential and congressional elections will have on federal pay and benefits. But based on what we’ve heard and seen from President-Elect Donald Trump and many Republican lawmakers so far, we could be in for some changes. Trump himself hasn’t specifically mentioned...

November 8, 2016
The U.S. Agency for International Development mismanaged more than $60 million in funding to deal with the 2014 Ebola outbreak, according to a watchdog. The misstep related to taking money from one set of budget accounts and reimbursing a different set of accounts with separate spending authorities with fiscal 2015...

November 3, 2016
The percentage of disabled post-9/11 vets with health insurance through the Veterans Affairs Department has increased 11 percent over the last few years, despite the department’s well-publicized management problems and the 2014 patient wait-times scandal, according to a new survey. Seventy-one percent of injured Iraq and Afghanistan veterans said they...

Database-level encryption had its origins in the 1990s and early 2000s in response to very basic risks which largely revolved around the theft of servers, backup tapes and other physical-layer assets. As noted in Verizon’s 2014, Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR)1, threats today are far more advanced and dangerous.

In order to better understand the current state of external and internal-facing agency workplace applications, Government Business Council (GBC) and Riverbed undertook an in-depth research study of federal employees. Overall, survey findings indicate that federal IT applications still face a gamut of challenges with regard to quality, reliability, and performance management.

PIV- I And Multifactor Authentication: The Best Defense for Federal Government Contractors

This white paper explores NIST SP 800-171 and why compliance is critical to federal government contractors, especially those that work with the Department of Defense, as well as how leveraging PIV-I credentialing with multifactor authentication can be used as a defense against cyberattacks

This research study aims to understand how state and local leaders regard their agency’s innovation efforts and what they are doing to overcome the challenges they face in successfully implementing these efforts.

The U.S. healthcare industry is rapidly moving away from traditional fee-for-service models and towards value-based purchasing that reimburses physicians for quality of care in place of frequency of care.